These were the notes for the Sunday morning sermon at the Cornerstone family camp.
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
"Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Introduction - Jesus Tells Us What Is Most Important
This is probably one of the few places in the gospels where Jesus is asked a question with good intentions, and Jesus approves of the answer. Sometimes we read the New Testament and assume that everyone was off-track, but that is not the case. There were those who were seeking, there were those who wanted to know the answer.
In the Bible, whenever Jesus approves of something you should take notice. In the Bible, whenever someone approves of Jesus you should take notice.
Now there were some 618 commandments in the Old Testament. Each one of them was the “word of God” (queue the deep voice and reverb effect). What happened when two laws covered the same incident, but didn’t agree on the outcome? Does God contradict himself? No. So what do you do? There are entire books, the Mishnah (OT) and later, the Talmud, that record the observations of the famous rabbis on how to interpret and resolve these issues.
One way to resolve this is the idea of precedence: Certain commands had a higher priority or importance over others. Jesus himself scolded the Pharisees (Mark 7:8-13) because they were saying, “Well, I would help you Mom and Dad, but I dedicated all my money to God.” They made a bad choice, setting up a “command” based on bits and pieces of the law and making it more important than the 5th commandment “To honor your father and mother”
I call this the Reverse Mafia mentality: Mafia mentality says: Bump off as many people as you like, but give to your mother and the church. Reverse Mafia mentality says: Give to the church, but bump off your mother.
So when this teacher hears Jesus’ answers (verse 1), he puts him to the test: “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” If I was left on a desert island with a palm tree and just one page of the Bible, which page would it be? (Perhaps the tastiest one). What he’s asking: If God Could Tell Me One Thing, what would it be? What’s the big picture, Jesus? Which has the highest priority, Jesus?
Jesus gives him a 2-for-1 deal: "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
Jesus is saying three things:
These Two Commands Are The Key To Understanding Everything Else God Wants To Teach You.
- Love God.
- Love People
- Never Forget The Big Picture.
These Two Commands Are The Key To Understanding What God Wants From Me.
The world’s largest crossword puzzle hangs on a grid 7 feet by 7 feet. It contains 91,000 squares, with 28,000 clues printed in a 100 page clue book. One reviewer commented that he wouldn’t let his employees leave for lunch until they had solved at least one clue.
Is that how the Bible seems to you sometimes? Thousands of pages, obscure names and places, different culture, heresy lurking around every page if you interpret something wrong?
Jesus gives us the key: Every other command or principle or guideline in the Bible is a logical outworking of these two commands: Love God, Love your neighbor. The rest of the commands were designed to fulfill these two. If you come up with some interpretation, some addition or subtraction or division of the word of God that runs counter to these two, you’ve got it wrong.
The people of Jesus had a tremendous problem: they felt like the world was going to hell under the iron fist of a pagan superpower (Rome) ruling them. Why? The explanation that they could come up with was that they must not be “spiritual” enough and not keeping the commands of God strictly enough. So they began creating more and more regulations designed to keep everyone as pure as possible, closing every possible gap of interpretation of God’s law. In Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls containing the oldest fragments we have of the Old Testament writings, there was curious architectural feature: an abundance of ritual baths for purifying people. Now, ritual bathing was certainly not a big part of God’s plan for his people, but they wanted to be pure all the time so they spent tons of effort trying to wash all the time.
In another place, Jesus tells off the teachers of the law. Listen to this:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. – Matthew 23:23-24
So tithing is good. But they were worried they weren’t tithing enough. Every pastor’s dream. Should we tithe from our garden? Our cow’s milk? How about our grass clippings? Jesus commends them for their tithing, but scolds them for forgetting the big picture: justice, mercy, faithfulness.
Love God. Love people. Grab ahold of these with every ounce of who you are. Then let them loose to work way out into every attitude, habit and action.
If you ever come to a cross-roads, where the leading of God isn’t clear, here are the three big questions you can ask yourself:
- Is this decision likely to draw my attention, my strength, my passion, my willpower towards God or divert my attention, strength, passion and willpower away from God?
- Is this decision about another person the same decision I would like God to make about me?
- Did I lie about #1 or #2?
Love God
Loving God is not about doing church God’s way, but about doing life God’s way.
To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices
How do you view God? If you believe there is a God, then what is your reaction to him?
The ‘burnt offering and sacrifice’ approach is to give stuff to God in order to either get him off your back or sweet talk him into doing what you want. This is an attitude of fear, because you are always concerned about God’s opinion of you which might change at any point. So you want to keep him happy.
The ‘love with all your heart’ approach says God has done some much for me so I respond back. “We love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19
But when we talk about loving God, we keep wanting to elevate ourselves to God’s peers. In fact, one of the results of the “self-esteem” movement that started in the 70s and continues today is that many college age students from church backgrounds view Jesus more as their peer rather than as their Lord. Jesus called his disciples friends. Doesn’t’ that mean we are buddy-buddy? (“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business.” John 15:15). But Jesus turns around and says (vs. 17, “This is my command. Love one another)
Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. – John 14:21a
This command doesn’t have any expiration date. There are no holidays. There was no personal spending money. There is no “mine” as opposed to “God’s”
If that seems extreme, it’s because it is. But it is only a symptom of our crazy world that loving God seems “unnatural” and doing our own thing seems “natural”. Need help? God is ready to help you re-align your priorities so that you can say, with all your heart: “God, you are my one thing.”
Love People
Loving people is a natural extension of loving God, because God loves people.
Jesus and the teacher tie these two ideas together. From an interpreting-Gods-law point of view this is important, because it implies, unlike other commands, there will never be a conflict between these two commands. If there is, then you are misunderstanding what “Love your God means”.
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. - 1 John 4:20
Part of loving other people is humility, placing the needs of others before ours and feeling their joys and tears and fears as if they were our own.
Think about sins for a moment. When we talk about sins it is always a relationship. Either our relationship with God or with other people. God wants us not to focus on our planet Earth or whales or the mortgage, or our car, or the project at work, or 401K, but on our relationship with Him and and the people around us.
- Which is more important to you? Your children or your retirement?
- Which is more important to you? Your project or your co-workers?
- Which is more important to you? Your car or the people in it?
- Which is more important to you? Your home or those you invite into it?
- Which is more important to you? Your day planner or Outlook calendar or the person who needs your help?
Conclusion
This man who came to Jesus was himself a teacher.
But Jesus says he is just “close to the kingdom of God” What is missing? The messiah is missing. Like John the Baptist (“the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he”). He needs one more thing.
This teacher. He wants to love God. He wants to love people. But he, like so many others, wanted these things desperately and is frustrated by his failure and the failure of his entire country.
But he has come to the right place: Jesus.
Paul talked about this one missing thing. He too, was a brilliant teacher, a devoted follower of the law, but he was missing one thing: Jesus. Here is how he described it:
For I delivered to you what I received as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried and raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. – 1 Cor. 15:3-4
You can be as close to the kingdom of God as this man was to Jesus, but don’t miss this “one thing”
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